Friday, November 1, 2013

Many of our mornings look like this. Red gluts, of almost too many strawberries. We visit Pam's mum, other friends, and each time we take a punnet of strawberries with us, just to ease the gluts. And of course we eat our strawberries - on our breakfast cereal, or as healthy red snacks.

As regular readers of this blog will alreadyknow, our strawberry patch came up out ofthe compost, all by itself, which is whythe plants are so healthy and productive.They passed the survival test, so growing ina garden with a nice man watering andfeeding them regularly is too easy for them.

And isn't this the way with growing food at home? Gluts. The really difficult thing is growing just enough for your needs. That's almost impossible. It won't be long before we have far too many cherry tomatoes. Hopefully one of these days we'll have far too many passionfruit, and it looks like I'll be making up a few jars of sambal oelek (minced chilli paste, Indonesian-style) to deal with our chilli glut in December and January.I guess gluts are all part of the fun, of course, and they're much better than the alternative, which is dud crops. Despite many years of "growing our own" I still haven't got closer to the secret of just growing enough for our needs, partly because with a mere two people to feed, just one healthy, productive plant provides a glut.

3 comments:

Agree wholeheartedly. Here on the Sunshine Coast I'm just finishing a glut of tomatoes - also self-sown and the most productive tomato plant I've every had - and I am in the middle of a glut of pawpaws. The freezer is bulging with containers of spaghetti sauce(to which I added lots of grated eggplant that ripened at the same time as the tomatoes) and bags of frozen pawpaw flesh. Then there are jars of pawpaw and ginger jam in the cupboard, and my favourite: pawpaw, pear and raisin chutney. And visitors never go home empty-handed.